AMD GPU refresh coming second half of 2010

AMD have already said that performance-wise they intend to be ahead of NVIDIA?s Fermi architecture sometime in 2010, but what isn?t yet known is the game plan in place to achieve it.

Fermi looks good, real good. So it?s unlikely a ?minor clock increase style? refresh will suffice. At minimum we could be looking at a die shrink to enable major clock increases, but at the same time there is even speculation of a new architecture, or two.

Not a lot is known about Northern Islands. Some sources claim that the new chips will be made using 32nm fabrication process, but the others believe that the new chips will be made on 28nm node. There are also reports that Northern Islands will have richer feature-set compared to Evergreen. According to some other reports, ATI?s next-generation family is code-named Hecatonchires and will feature code-named Cozumel, Ibiza and Kauai chips, which are not northern, but southern islands. As a result, it is possible that ATI may be working on two new architectures.